Re: Is this use of BASE kosher?

Larry Masinter (masinter@parc.xerox.com)
Wed, 2 Aug 95 03:59:22 EDT

RFC1738 tried to avoid the issue of defining the 'fragment'
identifiers by leaving the # and the stuff outside of it outside of
the URL. RFC1808 tries to be consistent by defining the fragment
identifier as 'not part of the URL but associated with it', but it
leaves the [ "#" fragment ] as part of the URL in the BNF.

Neither document actually defines what the fragment identifier
*means*: this is presumably left to the HTML spec.

RFC 1808 seems to disallow spaces in #fragments. I think the choices
are:

1) HTML disallows spaces in anchors
2) RFC 1808 is wrong, or doesn't apply to HTML. Spaces are allowed in anchor references
3) Spaces aren't allowed in #fragment identifiers, are encoded, but
are allowed as name references.

Personally I prefer (1).